Things I Know To Be True E-Book

Andrew Bovell

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: NHB Modern Plays
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 108

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

A complex and intense portrait of the mechanics of a family – and a marriage – through the eyes of four siblings struggling to define themselves beyond their parents' love and expectations. Bob and Fran have worked hard to give their four children the opportunities they never had. Now, with the kids ready to make lives of their own, it's time to sit back and smell the roses. But the change of the seasons reveals some shattering truths, leaving us asking whether it's possible to love too much. Andrew Bovell's beautifully touching, funny and bold play Things I Know To Be True was premiered in Adelaide, Australia, as a co-production between Frantic Assembly and the State Theatre Company of South Australia. It received its British premiere in 2016, co-produced with Warwick Arts Centre in association with Chichester Festival Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith.

Leseprobe

Andrew Bovell

THINGS I KNOW TO BE TRUE

NICK HERN BOOKS

London

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

Contents

Title Page

Original Production

Director’s Note

Characters

Things I Know to be True

Track List

A Note on Textual Changes

About the Author

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

A Frantic Assembly and State Theatre Company South Australia production, Things I Know to be True was revived on 27 September 2017 at Oxford Playhouse, before touring the UK. The play was originally co-produced with Warwick Arts Centre in association with Chichester Festival Theatre and the Lyric Hammersmith. The cast was as follows:

MARK PRICE

Matthew Barker

FRAN PRICE

Cate Hamer

PIP PRICE

Seline Hizli

BOB PRICE

John McArdle

ROSIE PRICE

Kirsty Oswald

BEN PRICE

Arthur Wilson

Directors

Geordie Brookman & Scott Graham

Set & Lighting Designer

Geoff Cobham

Costume Designer

Ailsa Paterson

Sound Designer

Andrew Howard

Casting Director

Sarah Hughes

Associate Director

Jonnie Riordan

Featuring the music of Nils Frahm

Original artwork by Thomas Buchanan

Directors’ Note

It’s a delight for both of us to be restaging Andrew’s beautiful play for a third time and bringing it to an even wider UK audience. When we started discussing a possible cross hemisphere collaboration in 2013 we never imagined that the resulting work might play to more than 40,000 people across the two halves of the globe and have such impact upon its audience.

Both Frantic Assembly and State Theatre Company South Australia are companies that are proud to place the value of storytelling ahead of everything else and in Andrew’s writing we perhaps found the perfect meeting point. But in the core creative team we also found a depth of collaboration that is rare and precious. The group of makers involved have, over the course of the three evolving productions, become an extended family of sorts and it is in family that the play itself finds its emotive focus.

Andrew’s writing is always, in one way or another, about our struggle to love and how we can hurt those close to us with a kind of precision guided impact that is beyond us with anyone else. In Things I Know To Be True he asks us, what do the generations owe each other? Can the ‘sacrifice now live later’ ethos of our parents generation ever find a happy meeting point with the ‘live now’ approach of the millenials? Most of all he looks at the tightness of the ties that bind and how we must face our parents’ imperfections as part of facing our own.

Geordie Brookman & Scott Graham

Characters

THE PRICE FAMILY

BOB, sixty-three, a retrenched auto factory worker

FRAN, fifty-seven, a senior nurse

THEIR CHILDREN

PIP, thirty-four, an education department bureaucrat

MARK, thirty-two, an IT specialist

BEN, twenty-eight, a financial services worker

AND

ROSIE, nineteen, who doesn’t know who she is or what she wants to be yet

Note on Text

A lack of punctuation at the end of a line indicates a sentence shared by more than one character, and that the following line should come straight in.

Setting

The play is set primarily in a suburban home in Hallett Cove, in the southern suburbs of Adelaide, a provincial city in Australia. It is not unlike any other working-class suburb in any provisional city in the Western world.

A family room, a kitchen and patio extension at the back open to a classic Australian backyard. A Hills Hoist, a lemon tree, a well-cut lawn, a rose garden, a shed up the back somewhere and an ancient eucalypt towering above.

The play takes place over a year.

It Begins Like This

BOB PRICE stares at the telephone. His children are watching.

PIP. It’s late.

BEN. Past midnight.

PIP. And the phone starts to ring.

MARK. You’re standing in your pyjamas and bare feet, still heavy with sleep because you’ve just been woken.

ROSIE. Your heart is beating.

BEN. Too fast.

ROSIE. Like it might go.

PIP. Any minute it might go.

ROSIE. And you know if you answer your life is going to change.

MARK. And you’re not ready for it.

PIP. Even though you’ve been waiting for this call ever since we were old enough to stay out past nine.

BEN. Ever since you stopped tucking us in at night and turning off the light.

ROSIE. Ever since we came screaming into this world.

PIP. You’ve been waiting for this.

MARK. And you’re thinking which one of my kids is in trouble?

ROSIE. Which one of my kids is hurt?

BEN. Which one of my kids is dead?

PIP. And how will I tell their mother?

BEN. You could turn around.

PIP. Walk away

ROSIE. Not answer.

MARK. But you know that this

BEN. Whatever this is

ROSIE. Just has to be faced.

The phone starts to ring… once… twice… three times… four times.

BOB answers.

BOB. Hello?

Berlin

ROSIE. Berlin. A winter coat. A travel bag. A red nose. And a broken heart.

I’m standing on the platform at the train station. It’s cold. The train is late and my socks are wet. I’m not quite sure how I got here or where I’m meant to go next.

I met him four nights ago and he was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. His name was Emmanuel, of course, and he came from Madrid.

I’d been travelling by myself for three months. The great European adventure. London. Dublin. Paris. Prague. Then Berlin. I’d been saving for a year. Café work, bar work, babysitting. Mum and Dad said don’t go by yourself. It’s too dangerous. Go on a tour or at least with some girlfriends.

I’ll meet people. I told them. I’ll be fine. But meeting people is harder than you think. I mean I did meet people, at hostels and stuff but mainly other Australians. And it was fun for a night or two. But the boys just wanted to have sex and I guess that’s alright but if I wanted sex with an Australian boy I would have stayed in Hallett Cove.

So I go to the churches and the museums and the galleries and I walk through the cobbled streets and I sit in cafés trying to look mysterious and everything is so beautiful. Everything is what I was expecting it to be. And yet somehow I want it to be more.

I Skype home once a week and tell Mum and Dad what an amazing place Europe is. They’ve never been. I tell them I’m having the best time because I can’t bear the thought of them being disappointed for me. And when I Skype my brother Mark, I pretend the camera on my iPad is broken because he knows me and he will see it in my face. He’ll see that it’s all a mess and he’ll tell me to come home but I can’t go home, not yet, I mean then, I couldn’t go home then because it would be such a… defeat.

I don’t know what it’s meant to be. I don’t know what I’m meant to do. I keep wondering when it will start. Life. When will life start?

And then there he is. At a club in Mitte. Dancing. With his shirt off. And I think, wow, that guy can really dance. That guy is like… fire. And then he looks over at me. Me? And I am gone. I pretend not to be. I try to be cool. To make it seem like I’m not interested. But I am so interested. And we dance until the sun comes up. And as we come out of the club into the light, I think this is it. This is life. I am living.

And I know he wants to take me home. To his place. Or to his friend’s place. Or to someone’s place, I’m not quite sure whose place it is, and I say okay. Because at last I am living and I don’t want life to stop.

And when he kisses me I want to cry. Because I’d never been kissed like that. Not in Hallett Cove. And I’d never been kissed where he kissed me or touched quite like that. He seemed to know things and for once it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t. Three days. Three days we stayed in bed. And after three days I knew some things too.

We don’t even get up to eat. He disappears and comes back with a bowl of cereal and two spoons. And that’s all we eat. Cereal. Out of the same bowl. For three days.

On the third night I watch him sleeping and I do that thing you shouldn’t do. I think about the future. I imagine taking him home to meet Mum and Dad and my sister and brothers and and and how they will all love him, like they love me. And how clever I am and brave to have found such a man, such a beautiful man, different but the same and brought him all the way back to Hallett Cove and then, there I am… Oh, I am so embarrassed but suddenly there I am in our backyard with Dad’s roses all around us and I’m walking across the lawn on his arm, and he’s got tears in his eyes and Mum’s there in a new dress, which she never lets herself have and my sister Pip is there with her husband Steve and their two girls. She got married in the backyard too. And Mark, my oldest brother who I adore is there with his girlfriend, Taylor. And then there’s Ben, my other brother who’s there with a girl who’s new and won’t last because they just don’t with Ben and I love them all so much, sometimes I think too much, if you can love too much but now I have to make room for Emmanuel who’s standing there in a suit and he is just so, so… so handsome… And I… I’m wearing a white dress… And I’m kind of surprised, kind of shocked because I never even knew that that’s what I wanted. And maybe it’s not what I want, it’s what I think Mum and Dad will want for me but anyway I’m there in a white dress, on my father’s arm, walking across the lawn and…

Then he wakes up and he looks at me as if he knows what I’m thinking and as if he wants to get up and run so I kiss him on his lips before he can. And he smiles. And I’m gone all over again. And we make love, so tenderly, so sweetly and after, as I drift off to sleep, lying on his chest, listening to the beat of his heart, thinking I could listen to this for the rest of my life, I think is this it, is this what falling in love is?

And when I wake up in the morning he’s gone… along with four hundred euros from my wallet, my iPad, my camera, my favourite scarf and a large piece of my heart. I find a girl in the house, smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table and ask if she’s seen him. She shrugs and says that he said something about going to see his girlfriend in London. She tells me to get my things and to get out of her house.

I walk through the streets of Berlin. I feel small. I feel like I’m twelve years old, I feel ridiculous. I want to cry but I won’t. Well I do, a bit. But not as much as I want to. I want my dad. I want my mum. I want my brothers and my sister. I want to hear them laugh and argue and fight and tease me. But I can’t think of them much because if I do my chest will explode. I feel like I’m going to literally fall to pieces. That my arms are going to drop off and then my legs and my head. And so to stop myself coming apart I make a list of all the things I know… I mean actually know for certain to be true and the really frightening thing is… It’s a very short list.

I don’t know much at all.

But I know that at 25 Windarie Avenue, Hallett Cove, things are the same as when I left and they always will be.

And I know that I have to go home.

Home

The roses are in bloom. BOB is using the leaf blower. He blows this way. He blows that way. He hasn’t quite got the hang of it.

FRAN appears at the back door. She wears a nurse’s uniform.

FRAN. Bob… Bob… BOB!

He blows her.

Stop it!